


Knots

by KlayterMcCabe



Category: Travelers (TV)
Genre: Dark, Gen, M/M, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-10-12
Packaged: 2019-01-04 13:46:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12170082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KlayterMcCabe/pseuds/KlayterMcCabe
Summary: Hall and Luca come for MacLaren, but the person they find is Philip.





	1. Five Weeks In

**Author's Note:**

> So on one hand this is literal pornography, but on the other hand it's also despair porn, so if that's your jam, there's room in this dumpster for everyone. If it's not your jam, go in peace and enjoy the entire rest of the internet, 'cause this is fucking trash.

 

They were already in the garage when Philip came out of the bathroom, and his first impression of them was as vibrant, high-contrast shapes that surprised him simply by existing. He was fuzzy, his strap still around his upper arm instead of wrapped back around his wrist as a bracelet. Normally he would have taken his time, splashed water on his face, pulled down his sleeves, experienced in private the first rush of relief and intensity. But the advantage of Protocol 5 was not having to hide, and his plan, in so much as he had a plan for the day, was to putter around the garage, then wander the neighborhood.

His eye was caught for a moment by the texture of Hall's shirt, and only then did he place the men in the garage: Hall and Luca, the travelers MacLaren had turned in to local authorities for their failure to abide by Protocol 3.

It took that long for alarm to skim along the edge of his high, and he tapped his com at roughly the same time that Hall knocked him against the wall.

"We've got intruders—" he managed, before Hall hit the side of his head hard enough for the com to go dead with a single burst of static that Philip hoped was audible to the rest of the team.

He held perfectly still for a moment, trying to evaluate Hall and Luca. He was taller than both of them, which was somehow surprising; they loomed larger in his memory than they did in the flesh.

"If you don't have orders," he said calmly, "you're in violation of Protocol 6."

Next to the computer, his cell phone lit up with a text.

Hall tilted his head in Luca's direction. "Handle that."

"If the Director got you out of prison," Philip began, but was cut off by Hall's laughter.

"Don't quote protocols at me, you twat," he spat. "How long have you been in the 21st?"

Philip licked his lips. "Five weeks."

"Yeah? And has it fucked you up yet? Because I've been here for three years and lost most of my team, and all I want to hear about the Director is that somebody defuckingprogrammed it."

"It's MacLaren," Luca called. "He says that there's a problem with Philip's com, and wants to know if everything's okay."

Hall released Philip, who slowly raised his hands to push his hair out of his face. "I don't know what your agenda is," he said, trying to keep both his voice and his movements perfectly steady, "but if you want money, I can do that. It'll take a day, but I should be able to set you up with enough to..." and he trailed off, the word he was looking for temporarily lost.

Hall's laughter rang out again. "Are you high _right now_?" he asked, as if this was a joke and not Philip's default mode of existing.

"I need his passcode to put MacLaren off," said Luca.

Hall gestured at Luca. "Tell him your passcode."

"Get fucked," said Philip, and this time when Hall came at him he was ready, but "ready" wasn't enough to carry him through the heroin fog, and the embarrassing scuffle that ensued ended with his face pressed back against the wall, one of Hall's hands fisted in his hair and the other pinning his wrists against his back.

"Tell him your passcode," Hall repeated. Philip didn't answer. "Do you remember what you said?" Hall asked. "When I said that three members of my team had died here."

"No," Philip lied.

"You said 'two to go,' you junkie piece of shit. Five weeks, and you assholes were willing to throw us to the wolves. We gave up everything for Protocol 1— _everything_ —and ended up in prison."

He let go of Philip's hair, and his hand fumbled with one of Philip's. For a moment it was like absurdist hand-holding, and then he broke one of Philip's pinkies.

"So what do you do," Hall continued. "When you give up everything, and the Director abandons you? Where do monks go, after they dedicate their lives to God, only to discover that God isn't listening?"

Philip was sweating. The pain was distant but present, and for the first time he was grateful that he was too fucked up to face this encounter clearly.

"The Director isn't god," he said, and Hall broke his ring finger.

Philip cursed.

"Passcode," said Hall again.

"2144."

"You get that?" Hall called to Luca, then repeated it. "Call MacLaren 'boss' in the text. That's what he calls him."

"So what are you and Luca doing here, if God isn't listening?" Philip asked. He felt like he was shaking, but his body was still.

"Testing a hypothesis."

"Your science looks like revenge."

Hall laughed, and for the first time Philip could hear how hollow his laughter was. The Director as god wasn't an abstraction to him, and Hall had been deeply wounded by his faith.

"How far are those little quips going to carry you?" Hall asked. "Not that it matters to me."

"I think MacLaren's buying it," said Luca. "But we should hurry. I'm going to take out their system."

Philip tried to buck Hall. "Don't touch my rig!"

Luca ignored him.

"Leave up their security cams," said Hall. "I want them to see exactly who did this, and what happened."

They'd had guns, last time. Philip hadn't seen any this time, but he had one here, and it wouldn't take Luca long to find.

"Are you literally here to kill me?" he asked. " _That's_ what you're doing here?"

"MacLaren had the courtesy of not killing us," said Hall. "And I think I can return that level of professional detachment when we burn his team to the ground."

Philip finally threw Hall off him, and struck out with a clumsy backfist and then several jabs, heroin and desperation carrying him past the pain of each strike with his bad hand. He knocked Hall back and dove for the desk drawer he kept the little CM9 Ray had procured for him.

("You doing okay, Phil?" Ray had asked. "I know people who know people, if you're worried about whoever beat the shit out of you coming back to finish the job." And he'd offered that crooked smile that was always caught halfway between menace and commiseration.)

Luca got to him first and hit Philip against the wall, then stood between him and the desk.

"Jesus Christ," said Hall. "You want me to finish breaking the fingers on that hand? Because I will, if you don't calm the fuck down."

Philip couldn't stop himself from glancing again at the drawer with the gun in it, and Luca followed his gaze. Philip ran at him, but Hall tackled him from behind as Luca opened the drawer and took out the CM9.

"Ah," he said, not even bothering to point it as Philip and Hall struggled on the floor. He continued going through the drawers, and finally came up with a roll of duct tape, which he held patiently while he waited for Hall and Philip to sort themselves out. Only when they separated, both bruised and panting, did he take aim at Philip.

"It's going to take me at least ten minutes to tear this apart," he said, tossing the duct tape to Hall. "We should be ready to leave as soon as I'm done." He looked at Philip, his face blank. "Hold your hands behind your back. No one's going to kill you unless you make it unavoidable."

"Right," said Philip, swallowing. "I'm the person making bad choices here." But he turned away from Hall, crossing his wrists behind his back and looking up at the rafters as Hall bound his arms. Luca put down the gun and turned his attention back to Philip's computer set-up. Philip was proud of the system he and Trevor had put together, despite the limitations of the technology available to them. He wanted to believe that his security would hold, but Luca had received the same training, and had the benefit of experience.

"Don't worry about that," said Hall, yanking him towards the glass-encased room he slept in. "We've got other things to deal with."

"Scintillating conversation," suggested Philip. "A poetry reading. You want to look through my host's milk box full of vinyl. It's mostly speed metal, if that's your thing."

Hall shoved him over to the bed, their bodies making more contact than necessary, and smirked down at him. "Something like that." He idly tapped at Philip's com as he said this. "Is this working?" he asked. "Can MacLaren hear you right now?"

Philip shook his head, but in his ear there were low static discharges, brief and irregular.

Hall leaned in close, as if he could hear a subdermal implant just by listening hard enough.

"That's too bad," he said. "I wanted MacLaren to hear this. MacLaren, if Philip's lying, I hope you're paying attention."

In the static, Philip thought he could make out a masculine voice, but the com went silent again.

"Do you know what happens to prisoners here?" Hall asked. "It's so prevalent in this society that they use it as a punchline."

"I know their prison systems aren't ideal in terms of rehabilitation."

Ray had prevented Philip from spending more than one night in jail, and he'd been deep in the throes of nausea and disorientation for most of it.

Hall whispered with his mouth very close to Philip's. "MacLaren fucked over me and what's left of my team. So I thought I'd return the favor and fuck over someone on his. Are you listening, MacLaren?"

"He can't hear you," said Philip. "Nobody can."

Hall flipped Philip onto his stomach and ground against him, and for the first time Philip let himself become fully aware of the fact that Hall was hard.

"You're disgusting," he said.

"I'm not the junkie bent over in his own safe house. Prison rape wouldn't even be an issue for a guy like you. With your drug problem, you'd be throwing yourself at dealers for a fix. Can't rape the willing."

"You're actually a monster. That was why the Director was willing to let you rot in prison. Because you deserve it."

"So do you deserve this?" Hall asked. "Is that why the Director is letting this happen? Take your pick, Phil. Either terrible things happen to people who don't deserve them because the Director doesn't care, or the Director laid out every possible future and decided that the best one came from a past where _this_ happened."

"Clock's ticking," called Luca from the main room, where he was studiously facing the other direction. "I'm not crazy about this to start with, and we're running out of time."

"Why are you fucking allowing this?" Philip yelled at him. "You can't even look at him, but you'll let him do it."

" _Loyalty_ ," Hall breathed. "Luca might not love my plan, but he's still going to make it happen. Is that something your team understands? Or do you just turn on each other the second someone disagrees?"

Philip closed his eyes and stretched his neck. If he held his head at just the right angle, the com occasionally snapped on, clear but quiet.

"No one on my team is a goddamn rapist, so it really hasn't come up."

"You can be snotty about this if you want," said Hall. "That doesn't keep it from happening."

Philip felt distant, and not just from the heroin. He'd never wanted to disappear so badly. _When they leave,_ he thought. _I'm going to give myself an extra dose. Marcy will understand that these are extenuating circumstances._

Then he actually thought about telling Marcy what was happening. Telling anyone.

But this was an act of war like any other, and deserved to be included in a debriefing. It would have been absurd to ignore the time they'd spent strapped to wheelchairs just because they were embarrassed at being captured.

This was Hall's weakness, and Hall's dysfunction. Philip was privy to it, but it was not in any essential way his fault.

Hall tugged off Philip's belt and dropped it. His hands were cool on Philip's hips.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Philip asked. "What about this situation could possibly get a human being hard?"

Hall snorted. Philip closed his eyes and tried a grounding exercise, even setting it in the future, where everything had been dismal but familiar. The boots he'd worn on his way to the transfer. Boots he'd worn for so long that the sole was loose along one heel. The leather-esque texture (from a time in his life when he'd never touched actual leather) made soft with years of ground-in dirt. They'd been hopelessly comfortable, even allowing for the fact that the bad sole let in water.

Hall bit his shoulder.

"You can ignore me if you want," he said in Philip's ear. "But I'm not going away."

Suddenly MacLaren's voice was in his ear.

"Philip? Are you there?"

"I'm not ignoring you," said Philip. "I'm just trying to figure the odds that I'm still alive when you and Luca leave the garage."

"I already told you," said Hall. "Nobody's killing you unless you make it necessary."

"Goddammit," said MacLaren. "Trevor and Carly are closest to your location, and they're both at least eight minutes out."

And this snapped everything into focus. It was hard to keep track of time when he was high, but time didn't _need_ to be kept track of—eight minutes would pass, and then Carly or Trevor would be here.

_Didn't the FBI give you a siren for your car_ , he thought. _Now would be a good time to turn it on_.

Just hearing MacLaren's voice in his ear made him unalone, the same way that being wheeled into that dark room with the flooded floor had made him unalone as soon as he'd seen Marcy's pale face through the gloom. This encounter was not a nightmare that loomed into an indefinite future. It was real, but it would end.

Hall pressed the blunt head of his cock inside him, and Philip made a noise. Luca glanced over at them, then quickly looked away again.

"Goddamn," breathed Hall, pressing all the way inside.

"Are you hurt," said MacLaren, not making it a question. "Is there anything else you can tell me about your situation? I assume by Luca you mean the traveler we encountered before. Is Hall with him? Are they alone?"

"I've been hurt worse," said Philip.

Hall laughed. "I can try harder, if you want." He brushed against one of Philip's broken fingers, then wrenched it, and Philip failed to swallow back a scream.

"If giving me intel will put you in danger, don't do it," said MacLaren immediately. His voice was so tense that for a moment Philip had the thought _is he mad at me_ , and then he wanted to laugh, but he didn't want Hall or MacLaren to hear what might pass for his laughter in this moment.

"Don't do that again," said Luca, and Philip was surprised to see that he'd drifted closer to them. "You're already doing it; don't torture him."

"Fuck off," said Hall, and he lost his rhythm for a few thrusts.

"The longer you take, the more danger we're in. Are you weighing that?"

"Well I tell you what's gonna take longer is you fucking whispering doubts in my ear when I'm trying to cum."

Luca set his jaw and walked back over to monitor the exterior security cams.

"Two to go," said Philip. "That's what I said last time, right? Sounds like Luca already thinks you're a piece of shit. So really it's just one to go when every team in the region targets you."

"Shut up," said Hall. His voice was strained, his body taut.

"You can ignore me if you want," Philip snapped back. "I guess this is the best side of you I've ever seen, if you have to imagine something else happening to cum."

"What the fuck is happening over there," said MacLaren, and there was something cleansing in his outrage.

"Shut up, shut up, shut up," said Hall, to himself more than to Philip, a chant that for a moment carried both of them along, and then Hall shuddered and collapsed against Philip's back. Philip bucked again, and Hall slid off him and out of him, and Philip was acutely aware of how stupid he had to look right now, with his pants around his ankles and his ass in the air. Philip stood up, and Hall faced away from him to tuck himself back in and pull up his pants.

"Is everything set?" Hall called to Luca.

"Been set, been ready. Let's get out of here."

Hall turned to Philip and smiled, but it was a forced smile, and in that moment he looked exactly like what he was: a broken man playing at being a villain just to twist himself into uglier knots.

"Tell your team I said 'hi.' Tell them I'm sorry it was you and not the tactician."

"If I'd been our tactician, you'd be in pieces." Philip was torn between wanting to distract them and wanting them gone. The idea of them escaping, haunting his future, was unbearable. It was—almost—equally unbearable to face them now.

"You know we lost our historian first," said Hall, almost conversationally. "I always thought it was the laziest role. Gene mods do all the heavy lifting; you're just the skin the information lives in."

Luca pressed the button to raise the garage door, and it rumbled to life.

"Cut my arms loose," said Philip.

Hall just looked at him.

"Cut my fucking arms loose so I can pull my pants up before my team gets here."

Hall smirked and looked away, but Luca came over, drawing out a pocket knife. He cut through the duct tape, which was mostly attached to Philip's thermal shirt rather than his skin, and had the decency to look away when Philip took his belt off the floor and dressed himself.

"Shit," said Hall, and Philip looked over, expecting to see Carly standing in the open doorway, carrying enough of her armament to make an impression.

Instead it was a kid, holding an iPhone in one slack hand. She was unusually pretty, with dark curls that framed her face, but her voice had the same metallic tenor as all messengers.

"Traveler 3326, you have been reassigned. Traveler 2835 will have further instructions." The kid reoriented herself to face Hall. "Traveler 2835, you have a new mission. Please accept the assistance of Traveler 3326 until instructed otherwise."

There was more, but Philip heard static louder than the messenger's voice, louder even than MacLaren saying something in his ear. The Director was listening. The Director was present. Hall's expression was as shocked and unnerved as his own, every bit as lost.

"End of message," said the kid, and then she blinked at them, clutching her iPhone to her chest. "Is this..." she blinked at them. "Are you guys Team Instinct?"

Hall started laughing, a sound equal parts horror and relief. Philip plucked at a piece of duct tape still trailing from his sleeve.

"Well," said Luca, turning to him. "Are you coming with us?" He glanced at Hall. "I understand, if you're not."

But Philip was thinking of Hall's phrasing from earlier: the Director has laid out every possible future. It didn't matter how many iterations away they were from the future where Philip Pearson— or 3326—led a reasonable life.

What mattered was the world.

How many minutes out were Carly and Trevor?

"I'm in," he said, feeling sick even as he said the words.

"Alright then," said Luca. "Hall. _Hall_. Get it together."

Hall stopped laughing abruptly and looked at them, at the little girl edging away, at the garage whose entire tech set-up they'd just scrambled. Philip flipped off his com.

"Mission accepted," Hall murmured. "Let's go."


	2. Twelve Weeks In

Marcy met Philip Pearson for the first time in a theatre, the rich red velvet seats all empty. The space was graceful and gaudy at the same time, with every inch of moulding painted gold and a ceiling curved high enough for shadows to form at the corners. She thought she was alone, calmly dismantling a small-scale explosive that was really more Trevor's territory, but Trevor was in school.

"Marcy?" said a man behind her.

She turned to face him, her floral dress whirling out in a way that was unlikely to strike fear in the heart of a possible assailant.

It took her a moment to place him, but she recognized the man standing there. In his picture, he'd had long hair and slumped shoulders, but this man stood with military straightness and had a military buzz cut. Only his threadbare parka matched the photo. He reached out, then lowered his hand without touching her.

"Marcy," he said again.

They'd told her about Philip, of course, though no small amount of what she knew had been inferred from their silences.

A Stated Fact: he'd been uploaded into the body of a heroin addict, the same kind of historical inaccuracy that had led to her own inadequate vessel

A Stated Fact: he'd been abruptly transferred to another team

An Inference: that team and her team hated each other

"I was worried," he said softly. "That you might not still be alive. Your issues..." he trailed off, eyes flickering from her out to the empty stage. She remembered then that David hadn't been the only person to assist her previous upload with tapping cerebrospinal fluid.

Carly had called her Marcy 2.0 exactly once, and then no one had called her that again, but she saw them looking at her that way sometimes: as an unknown entity, as a stranger wearing the body of their friend.

They did, to a certain extent, consider each other friends.

With that in mind, she refrained from snapping Protocol 6 at him and nodded instead.

"That problem's been handled."

"Oh, wow. Congratulations." Philip blinked at her, and a smile flitted along his lips but died when she didn't reciprocate. "Is everyone else okay?" he asked. "I hadn't heard about any problems on the deep web, but..."

"Has this conversation been sanctioned by the Director?" she asked.

"No." Philip looked sincerely startled.

"Then we shouldn't be having it."

She turned back to the explosive. It was inelegantly built, but no less deadly for its amateurishness.

"I just." Philip's voice cracked and he was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was even. "I'm fine. Luca is fine. I wanted the team to know that things aren't as bad as they could have been."

Marcy clipped the last wire and began peeling duct tape with steady hands. Until she'd separated out each component, it still had the potential to cause damage, albeit on a smaller scale.

"Are you here on a mission?" she asked, glancing at him over her shoulder. "Because I am." His eyes wandered again to the empty stage.

"Actually, yes."

"Then you should accomplish it, and we shouldn't be sharing any additional information with each other."

Philip coughed. "You're dismantling my mission, actually."

Marcy gently put down her implements and stood up, her body coiled, her mind clear. If Philip Pearson thought they were friends, she'd have an advantage in taking him down.

"Ours is verified from the Director. Can you prove that yours didn't come from the Faction?"

"The who?"

Marcy tapped her com. "I need back-up. I've got a hostile traveler here, and I don't think he's alone."

"Jesus Christ, Marcy. I'm not a hostile. We can talk this out. If we're getting conflicting orders, there must be a reason." He glanced again at the stage, and then gestured at her. "Get down," he breathed, ducking down himself. Marcy followed suit but reached into her purse for the small firearm she kept there.

A thin white man entered the auditorium down by the front row of seats. His face was weather-beaten, but it seemed to her that there was something kind in it. She was taken by fancies like these sometimes; errant neurons from either her host or her previous upload, quietly nudging her personality in foreign directions.

"Philip, are you done up there?" he called.

"Just about!" said Philip, making eye contact with Marcy. "Get the car ready, and I'll be down in a minute."

"Who the fuck is the Faction?" he whispered to her.

And she had no way of knowing if this was a ploy, if his team had been compromised or just used, or if he was fishing for information with sinister intentions.

If Philip was supposed to be working with them, they'd get an order to that effect.

"Things aren't as simple as they look," she said instead, and the expression that came over his face was a small war between amusement, contempt, and despair.

"There's a secondary trigger," Philip said quietly. "When you peel that back from the wall." He stood up and took a few steps toward his teammate before turning back to her. He opened his mouth, but instead of saying whatever he was going to say, he tapped his com.

"I just told Luca I'm coming, Hall, Jesus. I told you not to fucking buzz in my ear when I'm working with explosives." He glanced back at her one last time, and his face was young and open and wounded, and he was looking at her the way that David sometimes looked at her, like _she_ was the wounded thing, and she wanted to yell or fight or leave, but instead she turned back to the explosive and listened as Philip Pearson's footsteps walked away.

000

"You saw Philip," MacLaren repeated. They were assembled in the garage, a half-moon around the desk where Trevor sat at the computer.

"He said to tell you that he was fine, and that Luca was fine, and that things weren't as bad as they could be." Marcy felt impatient with all of them, their dangerous attachments and weak explanations.

"How was he?" Carly asked, the words bursting out of her.

Marcy shrugged. "Working for the Faction, possibly. Apparently his team placed the explosive I was there to dismantle, but he assisted me in its removal."

MacLaren closed his eyes. "That explains some things," he murmured.

"But how _was_ he?" Carly repeated.

Marcy blinked at her. "I don't know how to answer that."

"Was he hurt? Was Hall there? Was he _okay_?"

"He wasn't injured. He carried himself like a competent operative, but was surprised that I didn't want to have a social hour in the middle of a mission." She paused, then offered the kind of bullshit qualitative analysis that Carly seemed to be digging for. "He came off as... sad."

"The messenger we received telling us he'd been reassigned," said MacLaren slowly. "That was before we knew about the Faction, and before we started verifying orders."

"No offense, boss, but I've been saying that for a while," said Trevor. Marcy understood, intellectually, that he sat in the chair Philip used to sit in, but until this moment that had never seemed significant.

"If they're in town we should get him back," said Carly. "Luca we can talk about, but Hall needs to be put down."

"I don't disagree, on a personal level," said MacLaren.

" _Don't_ start with me about protocols," snapped Carly. "There was never a _mission_ to put them in jail in the first place, and that was what started this whole shitshow. If our order to let him go was false, then I don't think we need to wait for _further instructions_ to correct an error. Great, congratulations, you can separate out your feelings from our missions, you're a _great_ leader, but for some of us this is a little more personal—"

"I listened to them on the com," said MacLaren quietly, and his voice cut through Carly's righteous vitriol. "I'm aware that you all watched the security footage, and I don't want to undercut the impact I'm sure that had on you, but I listened in real time to what was happening to Philip. Believe me, this is personal."

"What security footage?" asked Marcy.

They all looked at her, and she was aware again of the sea that separated them, the people who were supposed to be _her team_ and were instead brittle strangers.

"Philip's reassignment went a little bit sideways," said Trevor, offering her a small smile. She liked Trevor for his circumspection, as unlikely as it occasionally seemed coming from such a young man. Carly could be a freight train, and MacLaren was just as bluntly awkward in a quieter way, but Trevor carefully considered each word he used, and he tried harder than the rest of them to separate the Marcy of his memory from the woman standing in front of him.

"What are you avoiding telling me?" she asked. "And _why_ are you avoiding telling me? I don't have the emotional attachment to this person that the rest of you have; I'm not _fragile_ about it."

Trevor smiled again, and she recognized that the gesture was intended to be welcoming rather than placating. "We're trying to protect Philip's privacy, I suppose. Hall and Luca—you saved Luca's life, by the way—were travelers that we encountered in dire circumstances, and when we didn't receive detailed instructions about our interactions with them, there was a disagreement about whether they should join with us, and who should lead." He glanced at MacLaren, who sighed.

"They felt that my partner in the FBI was a danger to missions, and that he should be executed. I disagreed, and in the end we turned them over to local authorities to prevent additional problems."

Marcy gawked at him. "You turned on another team of travelers. Before the Faction, even. You just turned on them."

"It was more complicated than that." MacLaren paused, and his voice was tight. "But yes. That's what occurred.

"But the Director got them out of jail again," said Marcy.

"I believe they broke themselves out. They came here for, well. Revenge." MacLaren looked tired. "There was an altercation before a messenger came. It was... Assigning Philip to work with them was cruel."

Revenge. Cruelty. They were uncharacteristically dramatic words for MacLaren to throw around. He turned his attention to Carly.

"I don't want to act rashly now," he said. "Can you understand that? I'm _very_ aware of my culpability in this, and if I'd taken more time to consider my actions then, things might be different now. I'd like to refrain from making another mistake."

Carly's expression was unreadable. Marcy was aware of tension between them that never seemed to be strictly mission-related, but it had seemed presumptuous—irrelevant, even—to pry. But she'd felt that way about Philip too, and apparently the shape of his absence had been affecting them in ways she couldn't have anticipated.

"I can understand," said Carly quietly. "Of course I can. And none of us tried to stop you. We all supported your plan at the time."

_Even me?_ Marcy wanted to ask. But it was better not to know the answer, not to constantly compare herself the way the rest of them did.

"Let's take a break," said MacLaren. "I know you all have lives to attend to. We can reconvene in a few hours, and we'll discuss what to do. I want everyone's input on this, Marcy in particular." He made eye contact with her. "You're right that you're not as involved as the rest of us, and I think we could use your detachment."

Marcy nodded. Carly and MacLaren both left, a careful distance between them, but Trevor didn't move. Marcy inhaled and turned to him. He seemed to be waiting for her to speak, which made it harder instead of easier.

"Tell me about Philip," she said.

Trevor sighed. "Philip was a deeply moral person, I think. He was... haunted. It might have been a natural tendency, or it might have been exacerbated by the drug use. He couldn't not think about all the good we weren't doing, all the disasters we didn't attempt to mitigate." He paused. "You were closer to him than the rest of us."

This was the feeling she hated the most. The context she was missing, not just lived context formed between her team and her former incarnation, but the pieces of _herself_ that had been deleted and rearranged to allow for the abnormalities in the brain that housed her.

"Like David and I were close," she said.

"No," said Trevor. "Not," and he stumbled over the word, "romantic. Just... Carly and MacLaren and I were all given healthy hosts with no surprises. You and Philip bonded over mutual difficulties. You were kind to each other."

"Well," she said ruefully. "That explains why he was surprised when I called him a hostile."

Trevor actually laughed at that. "I don't understand how difficult this is for you," he said. "I can't, obviously. But I want you to know that I've watched you through two uniquely difficult struggles, and I admire the way you've borne them." He paused. "I apologize if this is condescending. But you're doing a good job, Marcy."

"Thank you." She swallowed. "I know, but I don't mind hearing that." She bit her lip. "Tell me more about Philip. And maybe. Tell me about me."

000

"I recognized the license plate on that SUV parked out front," said Luca. They were crashing in an empty house in a particularly dilapidated neighborhood, and until they'd installed nominal security their biggest threats had been from a group of roving teenagers and a single shabby junkie looking for a place to sleep. Luca had pushed the bulk of the debris into one empty room, but the place was cold and filthy, and none of them had shown an inclination to make it more livable.

"What SUV," said Philip, not trying particularly hard to come off as sincere.

"I'm not going to say anything to Hall, but if you're in contact with your old team, I wouldn't mind the chance to come up with a contingency plan."

Philip sighed. "They were there, but I didn't have anything to do with it. I saw Marcy."

Luca's face softened. "How was she?"

"She seemed different. Harder. But she said that her condition had been fixed. I don't know, apparently the Director sent someone to save her after all."

Luca nodded. "The 21st makes everyone harder. It's not a bad thing, if it'll help her survive."

"I didn't say it was a bad thing," Philip snapped. The one thing he was grateful to Hall and Luca for—genuinely grateful—was getting him clean. His own team had been willing to string him along, to help him by looking the other way as long as he was clear-headed and steady-handed for missions. Hall had made his addiction a priority, and if his detox had been harsher than he might have preferred, it had at least been effective.

It was hardest to stay clean in periods like this; quiet downtime, when he was trapped in close proximity to a man he hated and a man he tolerated, none of them with covers to maintain because Hall had blown through Protocol 5 before he'd ever met him.

The only saving grace was that Hall worked almost as hard to avoid him as he worked to avoid Hall.

"Have you ever heard of the faction?" Philip asked.

"What faction?"

"Just something Marcy said." He'd been debating whether to say anything at all. The idea that Hall's team and his team—he still thought of MacLaren's team as _his_ , though he'd spent almost twice as long with Hall and Luca as he ever had with them—were working at cross-purposes was exciting and terrifying both.

"Do you ever wonder," he said slowly, "whether our orders are compromised?"

"Of course," said Luca, so quickly that Philip turned to face him.

"Really?"

"Look, you're new here." He raised a hand to stall Philip's protest. "I know you don't _feel_ new here. But you haven't even spent six months in the 21 st. I think that we miss some orders. I think that others are corrupted. I know that none of them are designed with our personal best interests in mind, but I think sometimes that the dysfunction runs more deeply than that." He sighed. "We used to debate philosophy, when there were five of us. Carter could phrase it more eloquently than I can."

Philip had thrown that at him one day in anger, that it was Carter's blood in Luca's veins, that they'd literally drained his life away to save Luca's. Now Luca couldn't even say Carter's name without that tightness over his face.

"Hall. Well, you know how Hall is about the Director. But the rest of us could take a more nuanced view. And the longer you're here, the less flattering that view gets."

"Hall's an idiot and a zealot."

It was to Luca's credit that he never defended Hall, or expected Philip to treat him with anything but fury.

"Zealot is a good word for him."

"Disciple sounds better," said Hall, coming in the door with a crooked smile. He was carrying a paper bag, and from it he drew three flask-sized bottles of Evan Williams. Something in Philip unclenched. Liquor was only the mildest respite compared to heroin, but it was preferable to sobriety by orders of magnitude. He took one of the bottles and moved to the other side of the room.

Hall sat in his vacated chair. "So what went wrong?" he asked, addressing the question to both of them. "We should have heard about the explosion by now."

"It's possible I fucked up the timing device," said Philip.

"So describe the process in detail, and let's figure out where you went wrong."

Philip shrugged.

"Don't give me that shit. You've got an eidetic memory, we ought to be able to analyze this exactly." He paused. "Unless you're fucking up on purpose. A post-game analysis can't fix that."

Luca gathered up the last two bottles. "I don't think alcohol is going to help this conversation along."

Hall took one of them back. "Don't play beleaguered middle child with me. If you wanna stay sober, be my fucking guest."

He took a long swig at the same time Philip did, and for a moment Philip was horrified by their parallel poses. He took another drink to kill his disquiet.

"Did I or did I not accept this fucking reassignment?" asked Philip. "If I wanted _revenge_ , I wouldn't have settled for petty sabotage, I'd have shot you in your sleep months ago."

"I'm just saying, it's funny that you didn't like the way this mission was supposed to play out, so suddenly it doesn't play out at all."

"I believe in the Director's vision," said Philip slowly, enunciating each word with scorn. "I've dedicated my life to bringing it about." He paused. "And I've managed to do it without ever going massively off the reservation, which makes me the only person here who can say that."

Luca unscrewed the last bottle of whiskey and took a long pull.

"There you go being a fucking martyr again," said Hall, and Philip realized that he'd walked in the door already drunk. "Don't you ever get sick of your own shit?"

_So fucking sick of it_ , Philip thought but said, "I'm going for a walk," instead. Hall stood up to block the door.

"Don't walk away when I'm talking to you, Phil. I'm the fucking leader here."

"Do. Not. Call. Me. Phil," said Philip. Hall swayed where he stood, and Luca gently pulled one of Hall's arms over his shoulder and dragged him out of the way.

"What the fuck," sputtered Hall.

"Just stop," said Luca softly. "For once in your entire life, let something go."

" _I'_ _m_ not the one fucking up missions just because I got _sad_ about some civilians dying—"

"Yeah, no, you've _amply_ demonstrated that you don't give a shit who gets hurt, Hall. We know. Everybody knows, okay?" Philip took another drink and stepped towards him. He wasn't drunk yet, but he planned to get there, and the burn of the booze hitting his empty stomach felt real. As real as Marcy, her hands around the bomb he'd so painstakingly built.

Had she been _angry_ with him? Was that why she'd acted that way? But even if the Director hadn't sent them a messenger to explain his disappearance, they had to have seen. _Leave up their security cams_ , Hall had said, words Philip had traced over a hundred times, like he'd traced over every angle of that fucking night, as if he could catch and fix any one moment of it and in doing so change everything that came after.

Did she think he'd abandoned them? Did they all think that? Or were they just disgusted with him? For letting Hall do it in the first place, or for working with Hall after. Or maybe it just didn't matter. She'd treated him like a stranger because he was essentially a stranger. They all had host lives to maintain and missions to man, and he'd been with them for five weeks and then left, so he was irrelevant unless the Director made him relevant again. She'd treated him like a distraction because that was all he was.

"Jesus Christ, you're gonna be whining about that 'til you die," said Hall.

"About _that_?" Philip repeated, his voice getting louder. "Go ahead and spell it out. What exactly am I whining about?"

But Hall just narrowed his eyes and looked away.

"You were going to go for a walk, I think, Philip," said Luca, his delivery so neutral that he might have been telling a goddamn joke. "It's a nice night for it."

"A nice night," Philip cackled, already picturing the lines from this argument that he'd be pulling up for the next one. He never laughed anymore, except ugly bitter laughs like this, at the fact that the 21st seemed so much better than the future until you had to actually live in it.

He walked out, and he was almost finished with the Evan Williams by the time he realized that Luca had been right: it was a nice night. It was too cloudy for stars, but the clouds reflected enough of the streetlights to cast an orange pall over everything, and he walked past houses with open windows, spilling voices and music and television chatter into the street. Solitude was possible here, in a way it had never been possible in the shelters, and as he walked along he felt not so much alone as untethered. There were only a few other people out at this hour and they ignored him, mutual sketchiness like a moat that protected him from lingering glances or conversation.

Maybe whatever the Director had done to fix Marcy had changed her, the way a brain tumor could make someone mean. Maybe she'd always hated him, but been too professional to show it as long as they were colleagues. There was enough to hate him for: his weakness in the face of addiction, the mistakes they'd attributed to drug use but had maybe been sheer incompetence, the way that he couldn't keep his goddamn mouth shut if there was an opportunity to needle someone. The fact that he had indeed once gone massively off the reservation, even gotten shot for his trouble, but still never managed to apologize.

Maybe they'd been glad to be rid of him.

Philip finished the little bottle and tossed it down a storm drain.

He'd made a half-assed attempt to get lost, but in truth there was no amount of drunk he could get that would make him forget the way he'd come. The white glow of a convenience store ahead seemed better than retracing his steps, so he stepped inside without a plan and walked out with a bottle of Pride & Clarke, the plastic burn of it better to focus on than his thoughts.

He was empty by the time he got back to the squalid safe house, and so drunk that he didn't recognize the open door as a warning until he was already through it.

Inside, finally, was something Philip had been half-waiting to see since his last night in the garage: Carly, fully-armed, standing in the middle of the room.

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't catch traveler numbers for Hall or Luca; if you're a more astute fan than I am, please feel free to throw out corrections (aaaaand citations!) in the comments.


End file.
